The empire rides again.

Again, a President prepares to send U.S. troops overseas. Again, he tells us that it's vital for our values and interests. Again, he has not proven his case. And again, Americans will suffer casualties themselves and inflict even more casualties on others.

In his first televised speech ever on the subject, President Clinton started with the simple fact that Bosnia is in central Europe, and that the United States fought two wars in Europe. From this he concluded that "Europe's freedom, and Europe's security, is vital to our own national security."

But this is the faultiest of reasoning. World War I was one of the most senseless and brutal wars in history; U.S. participation in that one can hardly be used as justification for Bosnian intervention today. World War II, "the good war," was fought not because of some localized conflict like Bosnia but because Hitler's Germany threatened to conquer the world. The Serbs are not capable of such conquest.

Just ask the Pentagon. For three years the Pentagon has been saying Bosnia is not key to our national security. Now that the President says it is, are we all supposed to salute?

Second, Clinton made the facile claim that we must send troops to Bosnia "because problems that start beyond our borders can quickly become problems within them." Among these problems, he cited "the spread of organized crime and weapons of mass destruction and drug trafficking." How Bosnia relates to the mob or nuclear war or the Cali cartel is beyond us. There's no way that the Bosnian crisis can spill across our borders--unless, of course, American soldiers start dying over there.

Third, Clinton, like Lyndon Johnson and Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon and other warmakers before him, invoked the all-purpose rationale of defending "American leadership." This is a particularly galling argument since Clinton made a unilateral pledge to put 20,000 U.S. troops into the field in the first place. Now he wants all of us to go along, just to save face. With such self-vindicating rationales, a President could commit the United States to almost anything and then demand that the American people follow just to protect our reputation.

This is the imperial Presidency at its worst. But Clinton is getting to like the outfit. He made the commitment without Congressional approval. He's already introduced "a small number of American troops" in an advance mission without Congressional approval. And he says he has the authority to send all 20,000 U.S. troops without Congressional approval, even though he's seeking it right now.

The claim of damage to our reputation is overblown, anyway. It's not like foreign governments will start attacking the United States if we don't send troops to Bosnia. Protecting "American leadership" has always been a fig leaf for whatever intervention a President wanted.

Clinton all but assured us that this intervention will be bloody: "No deployment of American troops is risk-free and this one may well involve casualties." Bosnia is littered with land mines, and the possibility of American troops reigniting a civil war there cannot be minimized.

Nor was Clinton's bluster comforting. "Anyone--anyone--who takes on our own troops will suffer the consequences," he said. "We will fight fire with fire, and then some." But what happens after the "and then some"? Assuming that U.S. troops fulfill Clinton's threat and kill a lot of people, then what? Will everyone just kiss and make up, or is it more likely that escalation will lead to escalation, corpse to corpse?

Clinton's "make-my-day" rhetoric puts the lie to the entire notion of "peacekeeping." You don't make peace by threatening more death and destruction. You don't make peace by injecting more troops and more weapons.

Much of the impetus behind Clinton's Bosnia campaign is to burnish the image of the Pentagon, to justify the bloated military budget, and to pump life into NATO.

Since the end of the Cold War, the Pentagon has been in withdrawal, panicked about a world that no longer needs a $260-billion cop on every corner. So-called humanitarian missions have become its methadone treatment. And they serve to mollify the public, which was once, long ago, promised a peace dividend that never arrived.

There's been a lot of blather about NATO in the press lately, as if NATO was some sacred institution that the United States needs to cling to unto death.

But NATO has never been anything but a U.S. tool for dominating Europe, and for threatening the destruction of the world. It was standard NATO doctrine for forty years that if the Soviet Union ever put a toe into Germany, we'd blow the whole joint up. The nuclear blackmailer does not need a new lease on life.

NATO has also served as the chief purchase officer for the U.S. military-industrial complex. As Sam Day has noted, "American taxpayers have poured trillions of dollars" into NATO over the past half-century. "With no enemy in sight, there is no need for tens of thousands of American troops in Germany, air force and naval bases all over the continent, and listening posts stretching from the North Cape of Gibraltar to Turkey to the English moors. Enter the war in Bosnia."

Yes, Bosnia has been the scene of horrific gore. We, and everyone we know, are appalled by the rapes, the summary executions, the ethnic cleansings.

But the answer to warmaking is not more warmaking, and that's what our troops are trained to do. They are not trained to be peacemakers; they have not been on retreat with the Dalai Lama. They have been driving around in armored vehicles, shooting off live munitions at targets. Soon those targets will be human beings.

Look at the "peacekeeping" in Somalia, which ended up killing many people. Look at the "peacekeeping" in Haiti, which ended up undermining popular rule there.

We need to get beyond the notion that sending U.S. troops abroad solves problems. It doesn't solve anything. It just brings more bloodshed.

Haiti Belongs to Us

Does the concept of self-determination mean anything to the policymakers in Washington? When it comes to Haiti, at least, the answer is a resounding no.

Back in September 1994, the United States invaded Haiti with 20,000 troops. Oh, it wasn't called an invasion, and in fact it was applauded in many quarters. Even well-meaning people thought the invasion was the only way to get rid of the brutal Haitian coupmakers, who had overthrown President Aristide.

In reality, however, the U.S. invasion was not a humanitarian mission at all. It was designed to forestall a popular uprising against the coupmakers and thereby to protect U.S. political and economic influence. The State Department had leaned heavily on Aristide in exile to accept all sorts of conditions for his return. Only when he reluctantly accepted did the invasion go through.

Now the U.S. puppeteers are unhappy that Aristide is not dancing to their tune. One of the conditions he agreed to was to serve only until February 1996 and not seek reelection, even though he'd been booted out of his country for more than half his term. Aristide's supporters--the majority of the Haitian people--urged him to stay on, and when Aristide said he'd consider their demand, Washington threw a fit. Washington has also been upset that Aristide is not selling off state properties to private investors at a fast enough pace, so it suspended economic aid. Nothing riles Washington more than someone who refuses to bow down at the altar of private enterprise.

But Aristide is not taking the scolding sitting down. He has rightfully objected to his treatment by the Clinton Administration, which included blocking Aristide from fully disbanding the military and disarming the paramilitary.

Aristide is also rightfully outraged that the Pentagon seized 160,000 pages of documents from the Haitian armed forces during the invasion and squirreled them away in Washington. Many of these documents relate to the paramilitary group, FRAPH, which the CIA set up, and which was responsible for the deaths of some 3,000 Haitians. Among the documents taken from FRAPH headquarters were "trophy" photographs of FRAPH members killing or torturing their victims, U.S. soldiers who were there told The New York Times. The Pentagon and the CIA say the documents do not belong to Haiti but to the United States.

Just exactly what does belong to Haiti anymore?

We are witnessing the shameful denouement of a shameful policy.

Censors Away

Here's a cautionary tale for those on the left and in the women's movement who want to censor what they call pornography.

Canada has obscenity laws that are much stricter than those in the United States. And the victims of these laws have often been gays and lesbians. The blue-noses in Canadian Customs have a history of seizing books on gay and lesbian topics. Now a courageous U.S. publisher, Cleis Press, has just published Forbidden Passages, an anthology of gay and lesbian material that had been banned in Canada.

But it's not been easy. First, Cleis Press had a problem finding a printer for the book. Three printers turned down the job for fear of government reprisals. Then the press's distributor, Publishers Group West, backed out, claiming that its Canadian representative would be held personally liable. Two other distributors also declined. Fortunately, Cleis Press finally did find a printer with a spine and a distributor with some spark.

But Cleis Press still ran into trouble. Twice, when it sent out the galleys of the book for review in Canada, the mail was stopped. Once the package was ripped open and placed in a plastic bag, and Cleis Press believes this tampering has been the work of Canadian Customs.

The Canadian government's censorship of gay and lesbian books should be appalling to anyone who values free speech. Here is what Pat Califia wrote in the introduction to Forbidden Passages: "The source of censorship is our lack of compassion, our fear of difference, our reluctance to see the cracks in our image of Truth.... Each of us should have the right to know about our sexuality, consider the political implications of our pleasures and our beliefs about sex roles and gender, seek out more pleasurable and healthy ways o relating to other people, create art and literature that includes the erotic, and educate our children so they don't have to grow up in an atmosphere of sexual ignorance and fear."

Bravo to Pat Califia, to Forbidden Passages, and to Cleis Press. And beware of censors everywhere.

Nuclear Advocacy

Nuclear weapons were on trial at the Hague in November. Guess who the attorneys for the defense were: none other than the United States. At the International Court of Justice, the United States was represented by John McNeill, the Pentagon's senior deputy general counsel. McNeill put on his most reassuring tone, and insisted that using nuclear weapons won't necessarily lead to a holocaust. That assumption, he said, is "based on myth, not fact."

McNeill made them out to be just another war toy. "Nuclear weapons," he said, "like conventional weapons, can be used in a variety of ways: they can be deployed to achieve a wide range of military objectives of varying degrees of significance." And this is our favorite part: "They can be targeted in ways that either increase or decrease resulting incidental civilian injury and collateral damage."

Now how could they possibly decrease civilian injury? And why is the Pentagon still using euphemisms like "incidental civilian injury and collateral damage" to describe the horrific consequences of nuclear war, which the Pentagon is still dead-set on waging? U.S. nuclear strategy, said McNeill, is "designed to provide a range of options in response to armed aggression that will control escalation."

What's left to escalate after we've gone nuclear? Even though the Cold War is over, the United States is still preparing to wage nuclear war, and it is justifying that preparation with the thinnest reasoning.

By any standards, the use and the threat of the use of nuclear weapons is immoral, but the United States keeps justifying the unjustifiable.